Today I appeared on Bloomberg television to discuss Tesla’s latest earnings, as I have after the electric car maker’s last few quarterly reports, but this time things were somewhat different. Minutes before we went live, the show’s host Emily Chang told me that she would be asking me about a correction that Tesla had requested to my most recent Bloomberg View post about the new Autopilot 2.0 hardware suite announcement. My initial draft had said that “several” people had died in Teslas with Autopilot enabled, and at the request of a Tesla representative my editors and I agreed to clarify that only two deaths were tied to the controversial driver assist system. I am always happy to make factual corrections to my writing, but because I had limited time to explain the complex circumstances around this particular issue I thought I would write a post laying out the particulars of this case.

There’s been a lot of news about the explosion in auto credit in the US, which now exceeds credit card debt and ranks second only to student debt in non-mortgage consumer credit. Every aspect of auto-backed debt -amount, term length, securitization, subprime availability- has hit new highs recently… except repossessions, which remain relatively low. And that, say the issuers, bundlers and sellers of auto debt, is what makes the credit class so safe relative to mortgage debt. Because repossessing a car is relatively easier than repossessing a house, bad debts are easier to collect. [Continue Reading]